Revenge of the Tards
Pip Rippon. The Sportsman. Second pint, and it isn't my round, which is the only reason I'm still talking.
You keep asking me the same question in different clothes and I'll give you the same answer however you dress it up. I don't know.
I went up to Storrs at murkfall. The next thing in my head I'd swear to in front of an exacid is lying face down in a fold at lowmurk with a mouth full of peat and my hands under me like I'd been set down rather than fallen. That's the gap. Murkfall to lowmurk, the whole of the early murkneet, gone. Not hazy. Absent, the way a room is absent when nobody's put a lamp in it.
Somewhere in there I took two wounds' worth off my standing. A man walks out of his own door with six in him before he's down. I woke with four. I've looked at both since, at murklight, in a mirror, not stonked, and I cannot tell you what put them there. One on the back of the head. One down the left side of my ribs that had stopped bleeding before I knew about it.
So. You've asked. Twice. Let it alone and I'll tell you the rest in order, and where there's nothing I'll say there's nothing.
There were ¢hits owed. Not to me. I was chitchasing for a man off the Hellsborough wool markets who'd been paid in promises two seasons running by a clovenherd up at Storrs, and who'd worked out that a cut to me came cheaper on his nerves than walking up the Loxley valley himself after the light went. That's most of my trade. I'm the one who'll go.
The clovenherd is Nan Rocher. Six generations of Rochers on that ground, wooltards on the high side, demonspawn on the low, all of it bound for the Hellsborough tables. Storrs sits above the valley on the shoulder of the moor, Dungworth along the ridge, the ground climbing toward Bradfield, and past the top wall it stops being anybody's and starts being moor. You can stand in that yard and watch the whole valley fill up with murk underneath you like a bath running upstairs. Lovely spot. I'd have said so at the time.
I got there with the light going flat and a snough torch in my coat I never thought I'd need. Nan was at the penning, which is what a clovenherd does at that hour. Everything with a cloven foot on that farm walks in at murkfall and gets shut in for the murkneet, and you keep well out of the way, because that hour is the one hour a demonspawn is worth being frightened of. Big black-and-rust beasts through a gate one at a time, unhurried, that stench coming off them, sulphur and something older, the smell that's turned more ramblers off a footpath than any fence ever built.
Nan shut the byre. Bolted it. I heard the bolt go.
I want that on the record, because it comes back later and I've had people tell me I've misremembered it, and I have not.
Nan said the ¢hits would be there Neard'y. I said it had been Neard'y twice already. Nan said this Neard'y, then went and stood at the top end of the yard looking up toward Bradfield the way farmers do when they've finished with a conversation. Fine, I thought. I'll come back Neard'y.
I remember thinking about the wooltards on the way through. Forty-odd in the top fold with their heads down, cream fleece gone the colour of the ground, black faces, legs put on with more hope than sense. I've stood in a field with six hundred of them on Ronksley Moor and felt nowt. It's the only thing in my book nobody has ever come to me frightened of. And I'd said as much to Nan, cheerfully, the way you do. Something about breeding the wariness out of a thing so completely that all it's got left is standing about waiting to be eaten.
I thought that was funny.
I said it out loud. In that yard. With the animals stood there.
And then there's nothing.
I'm not going to invent you a middle. People do. They get asked enough times and they build one, and after a while they can't tell the built bit from the rest. I wasn't there. Whatever happened between that yard and that fold happened to somebody who never filed a report. Six hours. Two wounds. Nothing in between them I can hand you. And whatever you're about to suggest, murker, I've suggested it to myself at three in the murkneet more times than is good for a person, so leave it.
What I've got next is the peat.
Face down, cold through the front of me, one arm gone dead under my own weight. The taste of the ground. And a sound I couldn't place at first, which turned out to be breathing. Not mine. A lot of it, close, and not one bit of it hurried.
I got my head up and there were wooltards stood over me.
Not grazing. A wooltard's head is down, that's its whole arrangement, head down, mouth going. These had their heads up. Every one. Ringed round me close enough to touch three without stretching, and all of them faced the same way, which was uphill, past me, at the top wall.
Not one was looking at me. I was in the middle of forty animals and I was not what any of them had come for, and I'd like to tell you that was a comfort.
Then it called.
You'll have heard the description off somebody's grandfather. It doesn't cover it. One long note out of the dark above the top wall, dragged up from lower in a chest than any working bull can reach, and it doesn't arrive at your ear so much as at the back of your teeth. The whole fold went stiff at once. Forty bodies and one movement.
And I knew what it was. I've written the entry. I've argued it out in this room with men who ought to know better.
You go. That's the entry. The first note is the only warning you get and the only moment you can still leave, and by the second the ground you're stood on has stopped being yours.
I did not go on the first note. I was two wounds down, face full of peat, in the middle of a ring of the one animal in The Dark Peak I'd spent a career telling people not to worry about, and it took me a heartbeat too long to get my legs under me.
The second note came.
I got up in it. That's how close it was. Every wooltard in that fold answered, forty throats at once, nothing like a bleat, and behind it, further down the hill, I heard the byre.
The oldbrownhorn never came over the wall. I'll say that now rather than let you sit there waiting for it. I saw it, or I saw the piece of it that was on my side of the sky, a black shape stood up on the moor above the stones, twice the shoulder height of anything Nan had ever penned, horns crossed over the skull the wrong way. It stood there. It called twice. It did not come over, and it has never come over in any account I've gathered, and it did not want me at all. It wanted what was inside that wall, and inside that wall was forty wooltards, a byre full of demonspawn, and one man lying in the wrong fold.
I got to the yard. The yard is where it stopped being animals.
The byre stalls were stood open. Not broken. Open, doors swung back flat against the wall, from the inside. I'd heard that bolt go with my own ears six hours earlier. They should have settled hours ago. That's the whole of the horror of it. I'm not decorating it. Every one of them was out, and every one of them was walking, the same speed they walk everything, up the droveway toward the top wall and into the calling, and the smell of them filled that yard the way water fills a hole.
And Nan Rocher was stood at the top end of the yard, facing Bradfield.
Same spot as at murkfall. Boots in the same mud, hands down at their sides, looking up the hill at the wall with the whole fold going past them and not one animal touching them.
I said their name. I'm not proud of the noise I made saying it.
Nan Rocher did not turn round.
Six generations. You spend six generations inside one fold, moving the same beasts along the same trods at the same hours, and I've written down what old hands say about that, and filed it under folklore, which is where you file a thing you'd rather not look at. There was never a clean line to cut. When that fold turned, there wasn't a bit of Nan Rocher stood outside it to stay behind.
I did not go up and take hold of them.
I went for the trod.
Now. The trod.
If you know Storrs you know the one. Off the bottom corner of the yard, down the hillside toward the valley, walled both sides, dry stone, higher than your shoulder in the deep stretches, and the floor of it worn a good foot below the ground either side. Two hundred years of wooltards going down to water in single file, same line, same order, wore that groove. Nobody cut it. Nobody laid it out. It got made by the weight of the same animals doing the same dull thing forty thousand mornings running.
There's no way off a trod. That's what a trod is. Wall, wall, floor, and the only two directions on offer are the way you're going and the way the thing behind you is coming.
And they came down it after me.
It is not four miles from that yard to Storrs Bridge and it took me the whole of murkneet, because you cannot run in a groove a foot deep with a bad ankle and two wounds in you, not for hours, and there were stretches where a demonspawn had come up the droveway and stood in the gap where the trod crosses it, not chasing, never chasing, just stood in the way at that unbothered walking pace, and I had to wait, or climb, or go back and take the wall, and every yard I lost was a yard they'd already had.
Because they get quicker. Nobody believes it until they've had it behind them. A wooltard is slow. Forty wooltards are slow. What forty wooltards are not is slow in the fourth minute the way they were slow in the first, and you cannot see it happening. That's the trick. There's no moment where it turns into a chase. It never once felt like a rush. I've taken that phrase out of other people's mouths and put it in a field note and thought I understood it. I did not. What it means is you look back up the trod and there's a mass of them coming, and you look again and they're closer, and you know for a fact you haven't slowed.
Worst sum I've ever done.
The snough torch was no use down there and I put it out early, which sounds mad and wasn't. All it lit was the wall a foot from my face and a lichen growing on it that the organic network is welcome to whatever it made of me that murkneet.
What stays is the sound off the walls. Cloven feet on worn stone, hundreds of them, all in the same rhythm, coming down a groove their own great-great-grandmothers cut for exactly this.
I don't say revenge. I'd get laughed out of this room. But I'll say the shape of it. Nothing on that hill came for me faster than it walks. It just came, all of it, down a channel two centuries of patient chewing had prepared, and there was no version of that murkneet where the walls were ever going to be anywhere else.
I came off the trod at the bottom onto the lane, and a lane has sides, which a trod hasn't. They came out of the groove behind me and spread, and a thing that spreads has stopped being one thing. I got over Storrs Bridge.
That's the whole of my success. I'd like to give you something better. I never got the ¢hits. The man at the market got a refusal and a bill for my boots, and that was the last chitchasing I did up that valley. Nan Rocher is still up there in whatever sense you like, and I did not go back that murkneet and I have not gone back since, and you can put whatever word you want on that, because I've put worse ones on it myself.
I sat down on the far parapet with my back against the stone, on the safe side of running water, which is a thing you find you believe in at that hour whatever you'd say about it at this table. Waited to stop shaking. Took a while. And the sky started to lift.
At murkrise there was one wooltard stood at the far end of the bridge.
Just the one. Square on the stones at the Storrs end with the murk going thin and grey behind it, black face, that daft optimistic set of legs, head up. Not coming. Not doing anything at all. Whatever had been in the whole hillside all murkneet had gone out of it with the light, and what was left was an animal that couldn't have hurt me if it spent a week trying.
It watched me go. I got up and walked down the lane and every time I turned round it was stood where it had been, up on the bridge, seeing me off. Off its hill, I suppose, if you wanted to make something of it. I've not made anything of it. I've just never stopped noticing that it stayed.
No, I'll have the one. Go on then.
And no. Not the pie. Not the stew, not owt off a clovenfoot, and I'd rather you didn't do the voice about it. It isn't a moral position. I've not gone soft and I've not joined anything. I ate demonspawn for thirty-odd years and wrote a book saying it was cheap plain scran and nobody complains. All of that's still true. I'd not stop anybody at this table.
I'll have the flit. That's all. I'll have the flit and you can look at me however you like.
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